join list of lists in python [duplicate]

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• How to make a flat list out of list of lists? 39 answers

Is the a short syntax for joining a list of lists into a single list( or iterator) in python?

For example I have a list as follows and I want to iterate over a,b and c.

x = [["a","b"], ["c"]]

The best I can come up with is as follows.

result = []
[ result.extend(el) for el in x] 

for el in result:
  print el

Answer 1

I had a similar problem when I had to create a dictionary that contained the elements of an array and their count. The answer is relevant because, I flatten a list of lists, get the elements I need and then do a group and count. I used Python's map function to produce a tuple of element and it's count and groupby over the array. Note that the groupby takes the array element itself as the keyfunc. As a relatively new Python coder, I find it to me more easier to comprehend, while being Pythonic as well.

Before I discuss the code, here is a sample of data I had to flatten first:

{ "_id" : ObjectId("4fe3a90783157d765d000011"), "status" : [ "opencalais" ],
  "content_length" : 688, "open_calais_extract" : { "entities" : [
  {"type" :"Person","name" : "Iman Samdura","rel_score" : 0.223 }, 
  {"type" : "Company",  "name" : "Associated Press",    "rel_score" : 0.321 },          
  {"type" : "Country",  "name" : "Indonesia",   "rel_score" : 0.321 }, ... ]},
  "title" : "Indonesia Police Arrest Bali Bomb Planner", "time" : "06:42  ET",         
  "filename" : "021121bn.01", "month" : "November", "utctime" : 1037836800,
  "date" : "November 21, 2002", "news_type" : "bn", "day" : "21" }

It is a query result from Mongo. The code below flattens a collection of such lists.

def flatten_list(items):
  return sorted([entity['name'] for entity in [entities for sublist in  
   [item['open_calais_extract']['entities'] for item in items] 
   for entities in sublist])

First, I would extract all the "entities" collection, and then for each entities collection, iterate over the dictionary and extract the name attribute.

Answer 2

This works recursively for infinitely nested elements:

def iterFlatten(root):
    if isinstance(root, (list, tuple)):
        for element in root:
            for e in iterFlatten(element):
                yield e
    else:
        yield root

Result:

>>> b = [["a", ("b", "c")], "d"]
>>> list(iterFlatten(b))
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']

Answer 3

l = []
map(l.extend, list_of_lists)

shortest!